1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of student academic assessment and more particularly to a system and method for assessing and monitoring student academic achievement for purposes of identifying students at risk for not meeting predetermined minimum academic standards or targets.
2. Description of the Related Art
Comprehensive standardized tests have long been used for assessing student academic achievement or aptitude. Such standardized tests include, for example, the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA) test and the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS). These and similar standardized tests are used to test a student's reading comprehension, writing, math and science skills. Educational entities use the students' scores from such standardized tests for comparison against predetermined minimum standards or targets set by the school, the school district, or federal or state agencies, in determining, for example, whether the student should move to the next grade level or whether the student should be retained or required to go to summer school or for purposes of determining whether the student is eligible for a special program.
In addition, standardized tests are used by educational entities and state and federal agencies for comparing academic performance between schools and school districts, for comparing academic performance of students among the different states of the union and for other types of demographic analysis. For example, the reading portion of the MCA test is well suited to provide a picture of a student's general reading skills at one place in time compared to other students in the school district, in the state, or in the country. When students are sampled appropriately, the MCA test allows school-to-school, school-to-state, and even state-to-state comparisons.
Standardized tests are typically given at the end of the school year, and the results are not usually received until well after the school year. Thus, this “after-the-fact” assessment information is not particularly useful to educators to inform instruction.
On Jan. 8, 2002, President Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) amending the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) enacted in 1965. As published by the Department of Education, on its Internet web site “[The NCLB Act] changes the federal government's role in kindergarten-through-grade-12 education by asking America's schools to describe their success in terms of what each student accomplishes. The act contains the President's four basic education reform principles: stronger accountability for results, increased flexibility and local control, expanded options for parents, and an emphasis on teaching methods that have been proven to work.”
Under the NCLB Act, “an ‘accountable’education system involves the following steps: [1] The states create their own standards for what a child should know and learn for all grades. Standards must be developed in math and reading immediately. Standards must also be developed for science by the 2005-06 school year; [2] With standards in place, states must test every student's progress toward those standards by using tests that are aligned with the standards. Beginning in the 2002-03 school year, schools must administer tests in each of three grade spans: grades 3-5, grades 6-9, and grades 10-12 in all schools. Beginning in the 2005-06 school year, tests must be administered every year in grades 3 through 8 in math and reading. Beginning in the 2007-08 school year, science achievement must also be tested; [3] Each state, school district, and school will be expected to make adequate yearly progress toward meeting state standards. This progress will be measured for all students by sorting test results for students who are economically disadvantaged, from racial or ethnic minority groups, have disabilities, or have limited English proficiency; 4School and district performance will be publicly reported in district and state report cards. Individual school results will be on the district report cards; [5] If the district or school continually fails to make adequate progress toward the standards, then they will be held accountable.”
With respect to school accountability, under the NCLB Act, “parents with a child enrolled in a school identified as in need of improvement for failing to meet the performance standards set by the state will be able to transfer their child to a beffer performing public school or public charter school. Additionally, for the first time, parents with children in a school identified as in need of improvement will be able to use federal education funds for what are called ‘supplemental education services.’ Those services include tutoring, after school services, and summer school programs.” Id.
As a result of the NCLB Act, schools and school districts, now more than ever, are in need of an accurate, low-cost system that will allow them to assess individual students in order to identify which students are at risk for not meeting the state's minimum standards or targets for the state's particular standardized tests. By accurately identifying students at risk for failing the standardized tests, special attention may be given to those students to improve their individual academic performance in order to ensure that the school or school district meets the NCLB requirements, thereby avoiding the loss of students to other schools and increased federal or state scrutiny.
In addition to the need for an assessment program to ensure that schools meet the state's minimum standards or targets, it should be appreciated that schools now have a stronger incentive to not only meet, but exceed these minimum standards. For schools that can demonstrate that they provide higher quality education, they will be able to attract more students and will therefore obtain more federal and state funding. For similar reasons, private schools will also benefit from such an assessment system and method which can be used to demonstrate high academic achievement of its students. Parents wishing to send their students to private schools will naturally choose those private schools with high college placement and good academic reputations in order to ensure their children are provided with a quality education. Accordingly, there is a need in both the private and public educational systems for a low-cost accurate system and method for assessing and reporting a school's or school district's student achievement levels.
Related to the above needs, there is also a need to be able to monitor student achievement and cross-referencing such student achievement data with other important factors, such as the type of curriculum used, the teaching style used and which teachers have the greatest or least number of at risk-students. By cross-referencing such data on an individual and aggregate basis, parents, teachers, principles, superintendents and school boards will be able to more accurately determine which types of programs work more effectively than others or whether poor student achievement may perhaps lie with a particular curriculum, teacher or teaching style. Armed with such accurate and documented evidence, parents, teachers, schools, school districts, school boards and others having an interest in improving academic standards on a local, state or national level will be able to more accurately identify which teachers, which curriculums and which teaching styles provide better results than others. Appropriate corrective action may therefore be taken. Additionally, for teachers who have a demonstrated higher student achievement record, reward or incentive programs may be instituted in order to retain the best teachers and curriculums to continually improving the educational entity's overall student academic performance.
As identified above, under current practices most educational entities are only able to assess a student's academic performance after the student takes the standardized test. This after-the-fact assessment is of little use since it does not enable the educational entity to identify students at risk for failing the standardized tests beforehand so that specialized attention may be provided to those at-risk students. This inability to identify students for early intervention not only harms the student who may otherwise have benefited from early intervention, but it places the school at risk of losing students to better performing schools and being subject to state and federal scrutiny.
While certain educational entities may have the capability to develop their own internal assessment program to identify at-risk students, most educational entities do not have the available resources to do so, either financially or through qualified personnel. Furthermore even if resources were available to develop an internal assessment program, the results of such an internal assessment program may be of limited benefit and short lived unless the educational entity is devoted to implementing continual training of new assessors and continually updating and improving its assessment program.
There are a number of factors that effect the ability to implement a sound and accurate assessment program for use by different educational entities. First, the assessment system and method should be accurate in identifying those students at risk by providing a strong correlation between performance on the assessment tests and performance on the standardized tests used by the educational entity. Second in order for an educational entity on a limited budget to afford to implement an ongoing assessment program, the system and method should be low cost and require minimal training of the assessors. Third, the assessment program should employ assessment tests and grading methods that are “standard” among all users of the system in order to obtain accurate comparisons of the results between different students, classes, schools, and school districts. Fourth, the assessment tests should be “generic” or curriculum independent in order to obtain an accurate picture between classes, schools and school districts that may be employing different curriculums or different instructional materials for teaching their students. Fifth, there should be sufficient assessment tests within a grade-level of substantially equal difficulty for testing the students on an on-going basis without the student repeating the same assessment test. Finally, the assessment tests given to the students should be of short duration to minimize interruption and time away from class.
Accordingly, there is a need for an assessment system and method for use by educational entities which satisfies the foregoing factors while also satisfying the requirements of the NCLB Act or similar requirements and for meeting the high education standards parents properly expect from their children's schools.